1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of information networks, information gathering, altering and sharing, and more particularly, the invention relates to techniques for the assembly and arrangement of multiple format information into a work for forwarding to third parties and publishing to on a computer network.
2. Background of Related Prior Art
Electronic Mail (E-mail) and other messaging systems provide a means for sending electronic messages from one computer user to another. E-mail has advantages of convenience, format and storage of messages for later retrieval. As such, E-mail has been accepted and widely used for basic communication. E-mail is typically a text based format, however, and proves to be very limiting for the communication of complex documents, such as reports, articles, advertisements, images, audio and video.
E-mail systems do provide a means for distributing images, audio and video information by appending to a text based E-mail message with an associated file to be downloaded along with the E-mail message. However, such rich media files tend to be too large to be downloaded efficiently. Moreover, most systems that allow the appending of an associated file are designed to allow a single user to send unsecured files to an associate or friend, and neither allow for controlled automated distribution to multiple recipients, nor do they provide advanced accounting, billing or other such features (e.g., receipt notification). E-mail gateways also limit the size and applicability of attachments, and do not solve the problems of security and receipt notation or acknowledgment.
Within the past decade, the Internet, corporate intranets and personal computers have become full of rich media content including pictures, music, animation, and video. If a person wishes to communicate using any combination of this rich media, it is a laborious process. Each piece of information must be integrated into a user's e-mail as a separate attachment. These attachments are usually large files having disparate formats. A recipient of an e-mail message with attached rich media files must download each of these large attachments individually and then hope to have the appropriate applications or plug-ins to view each of the attachments.